Boris Fishman » New York Times: Book Review

Undercover Mother

Boris — Sun, 24 May 2009 17:55:11 +0000

The setting is the English countryside in the early 1960s. The time is winter — what seems like eternal winter. Little Anna Wyatt’s mother, a German war refugee, leaves the house one morning, never to return. There’s been an accident,…

Wartime Rations

Boris — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 01:43:03 +0000

I want to hate David Benioff. He’s annoyingly handsome. He’s already written a pair of unputdownable books, one of which was made into Spike Lee’s most heartbreaking film, “The 25th Hour” — for which Benioff was asked to write the…

The News From Siberia

Boris — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 17:00:47 +0000

Westerners hardly paid attention when the oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky thanked the Russian government for jailing him in the part of Siberia where the Decembrists were exiled, after a failed uprising against the czar in 1825. But Khodorkovsky, who was…

Coming of Age in the Burbs

Boris — Sun, 10 Jul 2005 04:42:08 +0000

The bar or bat mitzvah is a religious ceremony that initiates a Jewish boy or girl into adulthood. But you already knew that. You watched Krusty the Klown have a belated bar mitzvah on ”The Simpsons,” and you remember that…

Bloc Party

Boris — Sun, 01 May 2005 04:34:16 +0000

Dorota Maslowska’s first novel, ”Snow White and Russian Red,” is a blustery romp through the disaffected world of post-Communist Polish youth. Stranded in a country that’s no longer Communist but isn’t yet integrated into the West, young Poles compensate for…

Young People’s Guide

Boris — Mon, 22 Dec 2003 03:44:29 +0000

The emotional landscape of childhood, with its naïveté and surprise, is so difficult to reclaim that its greatest chroniclers – Lewis Carroll in ”Alice in Wonderland,” Boris Pasternak in ”Liuvers’s Childhood” — have often resorted to fantasy or abstraction. In…